Method and apparatus for reporting storage device and storage system data

Abstract

A method for providing data regarding a storage system comprising storage devices is described herein. A storage management module of an operating system of the storage system may be used for servicing (e.g., monitoring or testing) storage devices according to servicing parameters. For each serviced storage device, a reporting module of the storage management module may collect storage device and storage system data upon the occurrence of predetermined events (e.g., when a storage device exhibits an error and monitoring begins, when monitoring ends, and when testing of the storage device ends). The collected data may be saved to a report file in a predetermined format and received by a program configured to automatically extract the data according to the predetermined format for use in storage device and storage system analysis and to determine modified servicing parameters used by the storage management module to service storage devices.

Description

FIELD OF THE INVENTION[0001]The present invention relates to storage systems, and particularly, to a method and apparatus for reporting storage device of a storage system data.BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION[0002]A file server is a computer that provides file service relating to the organization of information on storage devices, such as disks. The file server or filer may be embodied as a storage system including a storage operating system that implements a file system to logically organize the information as a hierarchical structure of directories and files on the disks. As used herein, the term “storage operating system” generally refers to the computer-executable code operable on a storage system that manages data access and client access requests and may implement file system semantics in implementations involving filers. In this sense, the Data ONTAP™ storage operating system, available from Network Appliance, Inc. of Sunnyvale, Calif., which implements a Write Anywhere File Layou...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

[0010]By providing storage device and storage system data collected when storage device errors occurred and storage devices were serviced, data relevant to error analysis may be provided (rather than collecting storage device and storage system data at a predetermined time interval when such relevant data may be gone, as conventionally done). Also, by providing storage device and storage system data in a report file in a predetermined format, the data may be ordered and organized in related sections (rather than sending storage device and storage system data randomly interspersed in a file, as conventionally done). As such, the report files may be processed by a single program (report analysis program) configured to automatically process and extract the data in the report files according to the predetermined format (rather than examining the data manually or creating specific scripts for searching specific data, as conventionally done). By providing storage device and storage system data relevant to error analysis in a report file (having a predetermined format) that may be automatically processed and extracted by a single program (report analysis program), analysis of storage devices and storage systems can be conveniently performed to determine issues with individual storage device types, storage devices, or storage systems, or general trends across multiple storage device types or multiple storage systems.

Problems solved by technology

Conventionally, however, the disk or storage system data is sent to provide overall storage system performance analysis and is not designed to specifically analyze disk errors.

As such, the disk or storage system data typically does not contain data for properly analyzing disk errors since the received data may have been collected long after the disk errors occurred and are not relevant for disk error analysis.

As such, it is difficult to analyze errors of a particular disk as well as general disk trends or issues.

Further, conventionally, when the storage operating system encounters multiple errors of a storage device during servicing (e.g., monitoring or testing) of the storage device, it does not determine whether the errors are localized to a particular physical area of the storage device and counts each error as a separate error.

A storage device having multiple errors that reach a specified error threshold may be failed by the storage operating system (and later removed from the storage system) when, in fact, the storage device may have a single localized physical defect, whereby the multiple errors were confined to a small area.

Since, conventionally, the storage operating system counts each error as a separate error without determining whether the errors are localized to one area, the storage operating system may unnecessarily and prematurely fail storage devices in the storage system and cause a higher rate of storage device failure than warranted.

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